A rooftop system is unfinished until the discom installs the net meter

Every rooftop solar company in India has a moment it celebrates: the day a system is commissioned on a customer's roof. The installer photographs the panels, the inverter lights up, the sale is recorded and the sales team moves on. At Dhruvanta we celebrated that moment too, until our complaints taught us that the customer was waiting for something else.

For a household that has bought a system under the central government's residential rooftop programme, commissioning is the middle of the journey. The system cannot export to the grid until the distribution company has inspected it and replaced the household's meter with a bidirectional net meter. The subsidy cannot be released until that inspection is complete and recorded on the programme's portal. Until both have happened, the household has paid the full price for a system whose output it cannot yet fully credit, and it has not received the money it was told to expect. From where the household sits, the product is unfinished.

My argument is simple. Companies that sell subsidised rooftop systems should treat the discom's inspection, the net meter and the subsidy credit as features of the product, design for them as carefully as for the inverter and measure themselves on the day they arrive. Most do not, and that gap has become the commonest source of distrust in residential solar.

Where the customer's product actually ends

The programme's design is sensible. The household applies through a national portal, chooses a vendor registered with its distribution company, pays for the system and receives a fixed central subsidy into its own bank account after the discom has inspected the installation. Paying the household directly protects public money from vendors who might inflate prices to capture it. It also means the household carries the waiting.

In mid-2024, when the programme was new, the median time from installation to subsidy credit for our customers was 97 days. Within that median sat wide variation. In some discom areas inspections were scheduled within a fortnight. In one, a shortage of bidirectional meters stretched net-meter installation beyond 110 days for several months. None of these delays were our doing, and none of them were visible to us at first, because our systems treated the job as complete at commissioning. Customers rang retailers, retailers rang our state offices and our state offices had nothing useful to say.

That is the cost of drawing the product boundary in the wrong place. A household waiting for its net meter does not distinguish between the vendor and the discom. It has one relationship, with the brand whose name is on the inverter, and it judges that brand by the date the subsidy reaches its account. In our complaint data for 2024, complaints about waiting after commissioning outnumbered hardware faults by more than two to one.

Design the discom into the journey

We changed three things. The first was the price. We quote the full cost of a system, with the expected subsidy and its conditions shown beneath it, rather than a price after subsidy. That cost us orders for two quarters, because rivals' quotes looked cheaper. But it stopped us promising a number on someone else's timetable, and order cancellations fell from 12 per cent to 4 per cent once households stopped discovering the conditions after they had paid.

The second was the journey. Our app now tracks nine steps for every subsidised system: portal registration, feasibility approval, our installation, commissioning on the portal, the discom's inspection, the net meter, the commissioning certificate, the subsidy request and the credit. Each step has an owner. Where the owner is the discom, our job is to make sure nothing on our side is missing when its engineer arrives: documents uploaded, photographs taken at the right checkpoints, the installation matching the capacity that was approved. Many of the delays we once blamed on discoms began with incomplete files from our side.

The third was presence. We opened liaison desks in eleven distribution areas, staffed largely by technicians who had previously worked on meter testing and understood how a division office schedules its work. They do not ask for favours, and I have been clear that they never should. They make sure our files are complete, that inspection requests arrive in batches a division office can handle, and that we hear about a meter shortage before our customers do.

There is a version of this work that would be inappropriate. A vendor has no business pressing a public utility to bend its procedures, and a product leader who designs a journey around informal shortcuts is building a liability. The legitimate version is narrower and more useful: understand the discom's process well enough to stop being the cause of delay, and tell the customer honestly where the file sits.

By the January to March quarter of 2026, the median time from installation to subsidy credit for our customers was 38 days, and 51,800 households had received their subsidy. Part of the improvement came from discoms that built capacity as the programme matured, and I would not claim it all for ourselves. But the part that came from complete files, honest prices and early warning was ours, and it was the part we had ignored while we treated commissioning as the finish.

Three numbers a board should ask for

Boards of companies selling subsidised rooftop systems usually see installations, revenue and perhaps a satisfaction score. I would add three measures.

The first is the median number of days from installation to net meter, shown by discom area. A single company-wide median hides the area where customers are waiting four months, and that is where the brand is being damaged. The second is the median number of days from installation to subsidy credit, with the share of files older than ninety days. A falling median with a growing tail means some customers are being left behind. The third is the share of files returned or delayed because of errors on the company's side: missing documents, mismatched capacities, photographs that do not meet the discom's requirements. It is the only one of the three a company fully controls, and it should fall every quarter.

None of these measures appears in the accounts. Revenue is recognised when the system is installed and accepted, which is correct. But a board that sees only revenue is judging the sale rather than the product. When the customer's experience depends on a regulated process the company does not control, directors need to see how long that process takes and how much of the delay is self-inflicted.

There is a commercial reason to care as well. Our best source of new rooftop customers, after our own inverter owners, is the household's neighbours. A family that received its subsidy in five weeks tells the street. A family that waited five months tells the street too.

The programme will change. Subsidy amounts, eligibility and procedures may all be revised, and state commissions will keep amending their net-metering rules. The principle should outlast any version of the scheme. A rooftop system sold to an Indian household is finished on the day it is allowed to do what the household paid for, and the company that sold it ought to be the first to know when that day has not yet come.